Wednesday, September 19, 2007

ELASTICA, interviewMelody Maker, March 25th 1995 by Simon Reynolds

One man's Bright New Dawn for British guitar-pop is another's Last Gasp--themorbid vitality of a genre flying in the face of its historical obsolesence.Have we really reached the point--the nadir, frankly--where all that's left to celebrate is "adrenalin", attitude and catchy choruses? Record-collection-rock is the name of the game for guitar-based songcraft in the '90s, to be sure, butdoes the collection really have to be so constricted, so lame--the same tired oldlitany of Beatles/Who/Stones/Pistols/Smiths, Brit-rock's equivalent of the DeadWhite Males that make up the Canon of Literary Greats? From Dodgy to Supergrass,Shed Seven to Gene, Oasis to These Animal Men, the plague of four-man guitarcombos are runnin' scared of all the things that make '90s pop lifeinteresting--technology, the multiracial reality of UK society, and women-in-rock.

And what about Elastica? Surely they're not just Noo Wave revivalists butoutright recyclists (having only just paid off Wire and Stranglers for borrowinghefty chunks from the latter's songs). Why exempt them? Because, just by being75 percent female they stand out in a field overcrowded with jack-the-lads andpseudo-hooligans. Because their impeccable taste led them to the few morsels oflate '70's pop-punk minimalism worth scavenging, i.e. Buzzcocks and Wire.Because they managed to make the Stranglers a hip reference point. And becausetheir hooks catch more cruelly in the listener's flesh than the rest of their peers.

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Hungover the morning after the Brit Awards, Elastica--or at least 50 percent ofthem, Annie being otherwise occupied and Donna comatose on a couch in the band'spress office--have decided that what their battered constitutions need is lunchat the Camden caff they call School Dinners (on account of its hearty Englishgrub). It's a favourite Elastica haunt, frequented with "horrible regularity",says Justin, because it's open 'til 2AM and handy for post-rehearsal nourishment.Copious amounts of steaming stodge having arrived, and Justine having put in arequest for Horseradish and Brown Sauce to accompany her vegetarian fare, we kickoff by talking about the Old Wave of New Wave.

I used to be a bit of a Stranglers fan (a definite post-punk no-no), andwhen their entire United Artists output was reissued as a CD box set, I seizedthe opportunity to drag that particular skeleton out of the closet. Reviewing itin MM, I claimed, plausibly, that the Stranglers were one of the mostuninfluential groups ever, a band without legacy. A few weeks later, I heard"Line Up"--the nice'n'sleazy throb of Annie's J.J. Burnel bass, Justine's deadpanHugh Cornwell sneer--on Top Of the Pops. Ooops! One of the things that intriguesme about Elastica is the idea of Justine, a young woman of the Nineties, lookinginto her soul and deciding that her truest voice was Hugh Cornwell!

"Rattus Norvegicus was one of the records my brother left behind when hemoved out of home," remembers Justine. "He used to play Stranglers' records whenI was 12 or 13. I didn't really understand a lot of the language, and the imagewent over my head, but the sheer pop-ness of it got me. That sort of thing sitsfestering at the back of your collection for years. Then suddenly I found myselfgetting it out again, about four years ago, and thinking it sounded fresh."

So you weren't bothered by the band's misogynist streak?

"I think it just went over my head, being young. But looking back, I thinkthey could probably have got away with it more today. In the late '70s everybodywas incredibly PC. There was a lot of humour in what they did, which is amassive get-out clause.

"The Stranglers actually rehearse at the same studio as us, and we went outfor a drink with Jean-Jacques Burnel a couple of weeks ago. Annie's a massivefan, and he told her she was a really good bassist, and later he showed her howhe gets certain sounds. She was dead chuffed."

So four years ago, when you were first rediscovering the Stranglers, Wire,Buzzcocks, Blondie -- was part of the appeal that it was all so out-of-synch andagainst the grain vis-a-vis what was then the indie state-of-art?

"Definitely. We were totally conscious that what we were doing didn't soundlike anyone else. Because of that I didn't really expect us to get any press orget anywhere. Everything was pretty rocky, to do with 'feel'. There was PrimalScream, which was all about getting high and having a good vibe, and then a bitlater there was Suede, which had a kind of self-indulgence to it, too, whichpeople really related to."

And Elastica are emphatically opposed to musical self-indulgence?

"To be honest, I'm not really against anything, I think that whole concept isridiculous. There's room for lots of different kinds of music. What the musicpress write about is just a tiny area of music, and it's ridiculous to startseparating stuff within that area and get all tribal about things. I don'tunderstand why people feel the need to put other bands or styles of music down.Being a musician is just a great thing to wanna be; you can't really blame anyonefor wanting to be a musician."

Actually, I tend to feel there's way too many bands on the planet, and thatpeople should really hesitate before picking up an instrument, have a long hardthink about whether they really have anything to contribute. 'Cos 97 per centfrankly don't.

"Yeah, but every band thinks they're the best band in the world! Whatfrustrates me is when people constantly say it. Cos it's obvious--if you didn'tthink your band was the best you wouldn't bother!"

Well, that kind of arrogance has become a highly marketable shtick. It wasrefreshing when the Stone Roses started it, that whole 'we're the band theworld's been waiting for' thing. Then it became a cliche, what with the Manics"You Love Us", then Suede and Adorable, and now Oasis and a legion of cocky,mouthy gits. Oasis's whole raison d'etre is to be BIG, half their songs are abouthow they're gonna be superstars.

"It works very well for Oasis, though, they do it in a very charming way,almost cartoon. It's this sort of Northern lads thing, 'we're the best gang inthe world'".

"More than anything, it basically springs from male adolescence, just aschool age mentality. I'm not having a go at them or anything, cos I think itworks, but that's where it comes from--having gangs at school, wanting to controlthe playground."

You've said that you too really enjoy the gang element to being in a band,that sense of Us Against the World.

"There's always going to be an element of that in any band. That's the primarymotive, going out and doing it and having a laugh. Being on tour is a bit likegoing on a school skiing trip, messing about at the back of the coach. We don'thave a particularly professional relationship, it's more social. If I've gotnothing to do of an evening I'm very likely to go round and see Justin and Donnaand sit in and watch TV. They're just my mates, not people I'm trying to have acareer with."

The cover of Elastica has that gang aura down pat, a B/W shot of the bandas sullen, leather clad yoof, backs against the (brick) wall. The iconography ispure 1978, positively oozes tower block chic and 'street cred'. Inside, themusic's just as stark and monochrome. One of the things I like about Elastica isthat far more than any of their Noo Wave of Noo Wave peers, their music has thatWire/Buzzcocks angularity and geometry. And we haven't had that for the longestwhile in guitar-pop, it's either been feedbacky'n'fuzzed up, or dreampop hazey,or slack'n'grungey. Elastica songs are in-elastic, stiff but in a good way.

"It's logical music, it's got a logic to it," concurs Justine. "The othersalways take the piss out of me, 'cos I think there's a bit of an EasternEuropean, Germanic thing coming through there."

"I prefer simple music," says Justine, primly. "Donna and Annie, they'reinto 'feel'. Annie can jam away on the acoustic guitar, and people are amazed,they didn't know she could do that. And Donna grew up surrounded by musicianswho played the blues."

Well, there's not a single trace of da blooze in Elastica, thank the Lord.

"It just doesn't do it for me. I think it's really lazy in the worst way,playing blues riffs."

All Elastica's influences stem from that immediate post-punk era whenBritish rock had severed itself from the blues roots of rock'n'roll, but had yetto discover funk. The point at which Bobby Gillespie thinks it all went wrong, inother words: when bands ceased playing from the hips, drummers stoppedsyncopating and white rock lost touch with black music. Revealingly, the onlyblack music that Justine likes is ska--the speediest, jerkiest, most un-swingingform of black pop ever. On some Elastica songs, the beats actually seem closer todisco than raunch'n'roll, or at least the metronomic European brand of disco(more grid than groove).

"I don't think we are very disco," giggles Justine. "But we'd quite like to be."

"I'd like to be disco, satin trousers and all that," adds Justin.

One of my fave Elastica songs, "Connection", starts with this geometric,processed, utterly artificial-sounding guitar riff that sounds like a techno riff.

"That was actually done on a keyboard," says Justine. "But the sound iscalled 'distorted guitar', so there you go."

"It is quite drum machiney, that track," adds Justin. "There's quite a fewdrum machine orientated, hard-on-the-beat tracks on the LP". And it turns outhe's actually done a techno remix of 'Connection' and is quite into messingaround with a sampler.

So presumably Elastica don't approve of where the likes of Stone Roses andPrimal Scream are at these days, i.e. retreating from rave in search of therockist's grail of 'feel', jamming 'til the cows come home.

"Well I try not to pitch battles with particular bands but it's definitelynot my cup of tea," admits Justine, sounding at her most well-brought-up andtactful. "Backstage at an Oasis gig last year, Liam and Bobby Gillespie startedganging up on Donna, saying 'our music's all to do with feel and roots, andyou're just shallow'. But for me, when you start relying on that traditionalbluesy thing you're actually being more shallow. You're just sticking to aformula--a much stricter formula, in a way."

Apart from the odd jagged Beefheart-via-Cornwell guitar-fill, there's not asingle solo on the LP--which is doubtless why most Elastica songs clock in undertwo-and-a-half minutes, and why the album's 16 songs are over within 41 minutes.Elastica's is an anorexic aesthetic, purged of the flab of 'self-expression';their music is as severe and self-constricting as a pair of drainpipes.

"Donna was in the studio trying to work out a guitar-line, and she juststarted jamming and getting well f***ing muso, and we all looked at each otherand started giggling but kept on playing. And she looked up and went totally red,'cos she realised she'd been Pink Floyding it. In a way, we've probably got anodd perspective, in so far as any overt musicianship is totally frowned upon. Atthe start, if I left the room I'd come back and find Donna and Annie jamming awaylike two 80 year old black blind people from New Orleans--just the mostunbelievable blues jam going on!"

So you had to step in and put your foot down, reassert the ElasticaAesthetic: this is NOT what we're about!

"See, I don't think they really want to play like that, it's just hard to getout of that routine, once you've learned that way of playing. Annie's a diehardpunk, but she does love old stuff like the Stones and bluesy, 'feely' stuff.That's why she decided to play the bass, cos she felt that what she'd learned onthe guitar was totally restricting her, she was so used to going into bluesscales. With Donna too, there was a massive process of unlearning, of trying toplay things that were really simple and angular."

So now you've got the less-is-more thing down tight, what next? How do youevolve minimalism, without losing that streamlined haiku-like cogency? Album #3proved a bit of stumbling block for the Buzzcocks...

"And with Wire too. One of the most brilliant things about Wire is the jumpbetween Pink Flag and Chairs Missing. But I can't get into 154--I don't get it, everything I love about them just isn't there anymore."

While we're still talking about late '70s post-punk, which phase of Adam andthe Ants are you into--when it was Ants with an 'S' or Antz with a 'Z'?

"It's circa Dirk Wears White Sox. As a kid, I did like the Kings of theWild Frontier stuff at the time, then I moved onto Duran Duran. But quiterecently I discovered the early Peels Sessions they did, before Malcolm McLarennicked the Antz to form Bow Wow Wow. Brilliant. I really like the way PeelSessions sound; some of my favourite stuff of ours is Peel Session, cos there'san energy that get captured in those BBC studios, you do live vocals and don'thave time to bland things out pursuing perfection."

Do you like early Adam's pervy obsessions, all those fetish songs like "WhipIn My Valise"?

"I like it a lot actually. Also, for a while, Adam was just the coolestperson on the planet. He epitomised the brilliantly elegant side of punk, usingall that Allan Jones type imagery"--Justine is referring to the Sixties artist,readers, not Melody Maker's skipper--"like that table which was a woman on all fours with a glass top on her back. All his paintings were developed from Fifties porn--lots of airbrushed women in black leather. The Antz used a lot of that imagery. On one level, it's very titillating, but it's also very pop. So we're gonna make the next album S & M, with us all in black leather. Actually, I think Madonna's ruined that for everyone, ruined the concept of pervy sex forever."

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It's pretty clear now that the Menfolk have precious little left to say, when itcomes to song-oriented, guitar-based music. The same old scenarios, personae andobsessions are getting reiterated with diminishing returns. Personally,--giventhe sonic mindscapes being studio-spun by the techno-fluent, from Tricky toDillinja to Paul Shutze--I'm only prepared to take such traditionalism when itcomes re-freshed with a female twist. And this is what the Womenfolk are up to:they're not cooking up aural hallucino-genres in the sound-laboratory, they'retaking on played-out male traditions, tweaking and reinventing them. It's a formof stylistic transvestism. Drag kings rule: Polly Jean Harvey with her hoaryblues-man posturings; Courtney Love as Henry Rollins if he'd only remove his'Iron Man' emotional armature and let his 'feminine side' splurge'n'splatter; LizPhair and her feminised/feminist take on the geeky garage punk of Paul Westerbergof the Replacements. And there's Justine Frischmann, who's somehow miraculouslyfound imaginative space for herself in the Stranglers' gruff, fake-prolebelligerence and 'who wants the world?' cynicism.

That said, Justine's pretty phazed when I ask if she ever feels like hershe's in drag onstage.

"Well, I sometimes feel like Meatloaf, when I've got hair all over my faceand I'm really sweaty. Which is a bit depressing. But no, I don't ever feel likea woman in drag, to be honest".

So there's no sense in which you play-act a tough-guy?

"I think lots of women do that these days. And there's always been girly girls and non-girly girls. There's girls who have really high voices and like wearing dresses, and others who don't. I don't think I'm exceptional, it's just that most of my mates haven't been very girly. There's lots of young women in London who look and dress like I do."

As a kid, were you a tomboy?

"More so now than then, actually. When you're in your twenties you feel moreconfident about what you are, you don't feel like you necessarily have to dressup for boys. When I was a teenager I had really long hair and felt like I had towear make-up. But now I feel a lot more comfortable with short hair. It'ssomething I discovered with leaving home and going to college. In a way, it'sNineties urban camoflage. It came about when I was coming back from collegereally late, getting on the last tube. If you're wearing long hair and make-up,you're gonna feel a lot more vulnerable than if you've got short hair and bigboots. That was definitely an undercurrent to dressing the way I do. I rememberat school we had self-defence lessons and the teacher said that anyone with longhair should really wear a hat and cover it up, 'cos if someone wants to grab you,you're incredibly vulnerable. There's nothing you can do if someone gets hold ofyour hair."

So there's a sense that you sartorially avoid the things that signifyvulnerability or 'availability'?

"It's just expecting to be treated as one of the lads. You don't want todeliberately remove yourself from being able to be a good bloke".

Justine's not an icon 'cos she's 'one of the lads', though; she's an indiesex symbol 'cos there's a certain kind of British male who's really into the girlwho looks like a boy. It's almost a form of displaced homo-eroticism, I reckon.Justine, though, thinks it's more "an anti-bimbo thing".

"The girl who looks a bit boyish, it's the intelligent boy's choice, in away. But there's loads of boys who love girls with long hair. Damon was so guttedwhen I cut all my hair off, although he can get into it 'cos he knows it makes mereally happy. It's probably just a Nineties unisex thing, you know. I think womenprobably do look more androgynous now than they ever have, 'cos even in theSixties when girls were very thin and short-haired, there was always loads ofreally heavy make-up. It's genuinely a lot harder to tell boys from girls thesedays. Just going into shops, I often get called 'sir', and so does Donna. Ittends to be older people, or in Asian shops, that get confused."

Do you like the idea of 'passing' as male?

"I actually get pissed off when people call me 'sir' in shops, and occasionally I say 'what do you mean, 'sir'?'. And then they get really embarassed."

Another thing that makes me think of Elastica as drag kings is the sarkytone and deadpan detachment of the lyrics; Justine's talked before of how shedoesn't like sentimentality in songs, but prefers a certain coldness and dryness.

"Things that are really gushy and open tend to lose their power," she argues."It's like how it's a lot sexier to see someone half-clothed than naked.Lyrically, if you leave yourself really naked there's something quiteuninteresting about it. Whereas if you write something that's got a sort ofnegligee on, it's more intriguing... I do tend to write about things around me,observational stuff. Usually it's 'cos I'm frustrated about a situation butcan't say it to the person, so I end up writing a song about it. Donna's lyricsare more abstract; on the lyric sheet, my stuff looked better laid out aslimericks, whereas hers were less punctuated, more a stream of consciousness."

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After a platter of no-meat-and-three-veg, two mugs of coffee and several of myCamels, Justine's right as rain; Justin, however, never went to bed after thepost-Brits shindig, clearly has yet to detoxify from the alchohol intake, and solooks decidely green about the gills (the fried egg was an error). It seems thatat the Awards, all the New Wave of Brit-Pop bands' tables were clusteredtogether, almost as if to say: behold the Next Generation, let's see if they cancontribute as much to rectifying the Balance of Trade Deficit as Elton.

So do you actually feel like members of a New Brit-Pop aristocracy?

"We did last night, definitely. There was a gang of us there, and we wereall having conversations about America, about battle plans. Obviously Blur andSuede, we know well; Pulp, we know very well. Oasis, we're very friendly."

Do you feel 'stellar' when you're surrounded by faces that you've seen inmagazines?

"Not at all. It's all a bit surreal, you find yourself reading the musicpapers almost as if it's a school mag or something. Obviously, at first it's anamazing feeling. I used to think that if my face was ever in a magazine my lifewould feel completley different. But of course you get used to it, it becomesvery normal to read your friends' reviews and see their pictures in the papersand read the gossip. Even though what the music press writes is often so wildlyinnacurate and quite tabloid really."

Have you been in the real tabloids?

"Yeah, 'cos Blur have got quite big this year, so Damon and I have had a fairbit of tabloid action."

With you cast as Marianne Faithfull to his Jagger?

"Some wild innacuracies have been printed about the way we live, but you hopethat anyone with half a brain will realise they're not true. It's someone'slittle fantasy world and if you make a fuss about it, you kind of justify it, soit's better just to ignore it. Sometimes it can be quite invasive, but it justgoes with the territory. I had a strange day on Saturday, shopping for the tourand buying things like Imac and knickers and stuff--not the kind of things youwant people to see you buy. And because we'd been on Top of the Pops, it was verynoticeable that people were giving me funny looks--grinning at me, or at eachother. Damon gets incredibly paranoid, he hates it. Sometimes it's really nice,you feel really up for it, chatting to people you don't know. Other times youfeel like a total greaseball and you just wanna be totally anonymous. But to getinto a band, you have to want it, really."

We were talking of Adam Ant, and he's suffered probably the most intenseform of 'celebrity stalking' imaginable.

"Yes, he had this girl living in his air conditioning unit for nearly a year.He kept having this feeling that he was being watched! She could scamper aroundthe air-conditioning system and watch him through the grilles, throughout thehouse--bathroom, bedroom, everywhere! That's probably the most frightening thingimaginable. And he kept finding sandwich wrappers, crisp packets and Coke cansoutside the vent at the back of the house. He kept phoning the police and theysaid: 'we can't do anything until you have a flesh-wound'. It's like, 'oh,great!' But Adam was seriously famous for a while, wasn't he?"

So far the worst Justine has suffered is the over-zealous attention of theoccasional pair of Japanese girl-fans, a few peculiar letters, and some peskyphone calls.

"I've been getting loads of weird calls from people on the Continent.Yesterday the phone rang about 15 times, and some prat started giggling, and Igot really pissed off, started yelling 'get a life'."

Do you own a wok?

Justine gives me a blank look.

If you put it next to the receiver, it's like a bell--hit it with, say, a rolling pin, and you can deafen someone temporarily.

"Well, I was thinking of getting a whistle, which is what you're supposed todo with heavy breathers," she says, adding, absurdly, "but it's easier to justchange phone numbers."

So do you ever crave a return to anonymity?

"Well, we're not so far down the line we couldn't return to anonymity tomorrow, actually. I think it's probably premature to talk of it in those terms. I'd certainly like to be a quite a bit more famous than I am now."